Review: Ancient world: Love, Sex & Tragedy by Simon Goldhill

Is Alain de Botton about to meet his match? The author is a professor of Greek at Cambridge; a roguish cover showing a Las Vegas wedding-chapel sign, complete with Cupid, is emblazoned, back and front, with raves from Zadie Smith, who enjoyed the book enough to believe that you, too, “will find yourself reading (it) out to your other half as you go along”.

Ms Smith’s other half must be deaf, patient, or very much in love. Seldom has so much condescension been bestowed with so heavy a hand and little understanding. Oedipus Rex is introduced as “the mother of all stories”; Shelley’s drowning is summarised as “Shelley’s last swim”. He went down in a shipwreck. He couldn’t swim. Our enduring — and healthy — interest in the Victorians is dismissed as a popular